The U.S. had about 12,500 flu deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a third the usual number. Yet reported swine flu deaths in Canada were only about a tenth the usual rate, while the U.K. had an even lower ratio. That indicates the CDC figure is vastly too high.

So how does the WHO explain the fact that youre still alive to read this? We were "just plain lucky," shrugs
Director-General Margaret Chan. Thats really the best she could do - or felt she needed to do.

In fact, there was never a need for luck or alarm. Just two days after Fukudas Spanish flu comparison, I wrote
of a "porcine panic." I went on to reiterate in many more articles
that flu fears were being overblown: When the WHO made the pandemic official
, for example, I noted
that swine flu had killed only 144 people
worldwide in 11 weeks, fewer than die each day from ordinary flu. If I knew the outbreak was being exaggerated, then the WHO and others knew or should have known.

When the "when, not if" avian flu pandemic that was to kill hundreds of millions flew away, the WHO seized upon swine flu to say its pandemic warnings were justified. To do so, it had to change the definition.

So when swine flu trotted in, the WHO rewrote its definition to say pandemics "can be either mild or severe." That renders the term meaningless, because seasonal flu always causes "simultaneous epidemics worldwide."

This gave license to others to treat swine flu as a pandemic in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Thus, last August, the Presidents Council of Advisors on Science and Technology forecast
a "plausible" scenario of 30,000 to 90,000 U.S. deaths. In the Washington Post, author John Barry predicted more than 89,000 American deaths
.

This was obviously nonsense
. We already had information from all over the world showing swine flu to be vastly milder than the seasonal variety. A New York City estimate
suggested that seasonal flu was 10 to 40 times deadlier than swine flu. In Australia, with the epidemic already well under way and no vaccine generally available, people were dying at a lower rate
than normal.

In October, U.S. health officials launched a campaign to panic parents into getting their children inoculated, prompting such headlines
as "CDC shocker: swine flu killing young people at record rate." This was inexcusably cruel
: Not only were officials exaggerating a tiny risk; they were doing so when a vaccine wasnt widely available.

Today, with incredible chutzpah, the WHO even denies that it rewrote the definition of pandemic. "Having severe deaths has never been part of the WHO definition," Fukuda said
. So what if references to the changed definition are all over the Web, including in the WHO archive
? Its like Paris Hilton denying the existence of her sex tape.

Meanwhile, the world has wasted billions of dollars that could have been spent on diseases like tuberculosis, which each year kills 70 times as many people
as swine flu did, according to the WHO. Now add in the "crying wolf" factor, which means many people will ignore public-health warnings when a truly nasty disease comes along, and youll see how much damage was done by the swine flu disinformation campaign.